Each morning, with pitch darkness as her reality and the pending dawn still nothing more than a rumour, one of the most accomplished players in the world of women’s basketball awakens to the sound of an alarm clock in her Mission home.

For over a decade, Teresa Gabriele has been playing point guard for Canada’s senior women’s national team, helping lead her country to the 2000 Olympics and a pair of World Championships. And while defining the playmaking and leadership skills of her position, she has brought the kind of daily dedication and work ethic that fellow countryman and point guard Steve Nash would applaud.

But does the alarm clock really have to ring at 3:45 a.m.?

Hey, when you work in the family bread business because amateur sports funding alone can’t make ends meet, you learn to rise each day with the dough.

And in Gabriele’s case, that has meant hitting a series of appointed rounds at Abbotsford retail outlets like Costco, Wal-Mart and Thrifty’s, meeting with the delivery trucks and stocking the shelves with the latest in whole grain, rye and raison while most everyone else is still asleep.

“You have to be very disciplined, very scheduled and very committed and you have to find other ways to motivate yourself,” says Gabriele, 33, who works through the morning, trains until the early afternoon, then returns to work to re-stock shelves, before a second workout session ends her day.

“I am training on my own,” the captain of Team Canada explains of her three-to-four hour daily regimens which take place at local rec centres, high school gymnasiums and the University of the Fraser Valley, “so I have to find some kind of motivation to kick myself in the butt and get in the gym every day. It takes a lot of dedication because I have a fulltime job and I’m getting up at some pretty crazy hours. Then I have to get to bed at a decent hour so I can do it all again the next day.”

Thankfully, Gabriele jokes, she gets a bit of a respite from the bread biz beginning Thursday.

In advance of chasing one of the five remaining berths to the 2012 London Games at the FIBA Olympic qualifying tournament beginning June 25 in Turkey, Team Canada has gathered in the Vancouver area to begin a training camp today in advance of hosting three local exhibition games against the Chinese national team.

“I joke with everyone that when I go into training camp, it’s like a vacation for me because all we do is eat, sleep and play,” laughs Gabriele. “What more can you ask for? I don’t really watch a whole lot of TV.”

Quiet in personality, and a true leader by example, Gabriele, known formerly as Teresa Kleindienst during her years playing at Simon Fraser, helped lead the Clan to three straight NAIA Final Four berths under Allison McNeill, the current national team head coach, including two appearances in the championship final game.

Gabriele’s final collegiate season was current Clan head coach Bruce Langford’s first at SFU, a storybook 35-0 campaign that culminated with the school’s first CIS Bronze Baby national title. Langford was Gabriele’s high school coach at both Hatzic and Heritage Park in Mission.

This season marks her 15th as part of the national team program, and her ninth since being reunited with McNeill on the national team.

“She is the gold standard,” says McNeill. “I measure other athletes in terms of their committment and desire to represent their country, with her. She is what it means to represent your country, and really in so many ways, to do it in anonymity because we don’t get a lot of support and we’re not at the top of the funding ladder.”

And although she is a person of few words, McNeill says that when Gabriele speaks, everyone listens.

Like the time before a competition last season when Gabriele spoke to her younger teammates of the fact that she made the Sydney Olympics in 2000 as a 20-year-old, and assumed there would be a lot more Olympics ahead.

“She told them ‘I thought I would go to four Olympics, but I’ve been to one,'” McNeill recounts. “Its not always like her to do that. But she just told them all ‘You might stay and play for 12 more years, but we might not have a better chance because you just don’t know.’ That was so powerful. It really motivated the whole group for this summer.”

So sandwiched inbetween all that bread, Gabriele has trained and focussed on leading her country back to the Olympics.

On so many of those early mornings, it was never easier to feel more anonymous.

And while there is still a lot of road left to travel to get there, something says that each time her alarm clock went off at 3:45 a.m., Gabriele just told herself it was a quarter to noon in London.

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Head of the Class 2014

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